


Omission's Still A Lie

by eris_of_imladris



Category: 999: Nine Hours Nine Persons Nine Doors - Fandom, Zero Escape (Video Games)
Genre: Angst, Angst and Feels, Family Feels, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-25
Updated: 2019-09-25
Packaged: 2020-10-27 23:22:05
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,089
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20768633
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/eris_of_imladris/pseuds/eris_of_imladris
Summary: There is one timeline Aoi must learn about the hard way.Spoilers for all endings of 999!





	1. (Not Really) Safe

It’s not the path Akane told him about. But Junpei is in the incinerator.

There might be some hope after all, something to cling to, Aoi thinks. Not everything is lost.

He sits in the control room, fingers so close to the button that would start the process of incineration. Not that he’d do it, of course. He’s not a monster like the one in the incinerator now, threatening Lotus and Snake and Junpei. But he’s barely paying attention to the conversation. Instead, his mind is spinning so rapidly he barely remembers how to breathe.

It might not be the path Akane told him about, but he could do it.

Junpei is in there. He could free Akane so simply, so easily. All Aoi needs to do is flip the switch and start the process. Things might not have gone exactly the way she saw, but the essential parts are there. Junpei is in the incinerator. Akane is alive.

Barely. He watches her stumble away from the hospital room, where he’d held her as the others fled. The camera footage isn’t great, but even this quality is enough to show she’s barely on her feet. She doesn’t have much time. He needs to act, and now.

He looks for the switch, and his hand catches on an unfamiliar paper atop the flame-red button.

The paper’s not supposed to be there. He’s looked into this room too many times, cognizant of his role. He even looked last night, before everything started, and it wasn’t there. It couldn’t be there.

A sudden panic seizes his heart.

He doesn’t know the ending to the doors 5-8-6. He only knew 5-8-2, which he felt already, a knife slick in his back, breath burbling between his ribs. And 5-8-1, madness, a wider pain, a swifter death. He thinks as hard as he can about all the times they ran over what would happen, and realizes she never told him what would happen in 5-8-6.

Ace is threatening Snake. It’s too easy to think of them by their code names when he’s ignoring them for the moment, eyes fixed on the familiar handwriting.

_Aoi,_

_If you are reading this letter, it is the wrong path._

His blood freezes solid.

_This is the key to the end we need. He needed to find the safe. Without it, we are lost._

Aoi wants to scream at the letter that Junpei didn’t even really understand what it meant, what the implications were. He knew Ace killed in this timeline, but he needed to know so much more.

_You have done all you could. I couldn’t be more grateful for the last nine years together._

It’s a fucking funeral letter, he realizes. From a funeral she never even had.

_When it’s over, leave this place. There is a second bank account in your name, at our usual place, and you will need the number 58676779 to access the money. There’s more than enough for a long life, which I wish you._

_We will meet again._

_Love,_

_Akane_

Aoi stares at the signature. It’s hers, no doubt, just like the handwriting. But the words make no sense.

This wasn’t an ending at all. The ones with death and pain, sure, he wasn’t looking forward to those, but they’d at least die together. This paper? All it means is that he’s spent nine years of his life for nothing, that his little sister is about to die and all he can do is watch. Just like nine years ago. Just like what he’s given up everything, _everything_ to prevent.

He tries to think of what can be done. Junpei is in there, damn it, he’s in there, but there’s too much else going on, and now he can see that the bracelets won’t make the right combination, and Ace is still a giant threat, and an innocent has died and another is about to, once again.

He watches Akane stagger her way through the halls instead of sitting here beside him. What can he do when she holds onto the wall and draws a breath he can tell is ragged even through the shitty video? He can almost feel the heat radiating from her forehead.

He looks down again. What the hell is he supposed to do? He didn’t anticipate this confrontation, Hongou with the weapon, Clover dead, Snake little more than insane, maybe not even human. Everything happens so fast, his mind reeling from the words and their implications, and all he can do is repeat 58676779 over and over in his head like a useless idiot.

He flips the paper in despair, and sees something hastily scrawled on the back.

_Do it for both of us._

Do _what_, he thinks desperately, helplessly, shoving the paper aside - 

The switch is right there.

They’d talked about it. Joked, sometimes, over pizza and paperwork, of what it’d be like to turn him to ash. The nights when the nightmares took over, they whispered their shared revenge fantasy with the utmost seriousness. She’d always told him that it couldn’t happen, and even at his worst moments, she tried to tell him he was a better person.

But not now. He was not a better person. He wasn’t sure he was even a person at all. Just a bomb with a nine-year timer.

He flips the switch.

It’s a cruel mockery of what should happen. No one finds the hidden computer and the puzzle inside, no one looks anywhere but at Snake’s body as he hurls himself at Ace, at his bullet-riddled body that is still somehow alive. Aoi feels much the same, but his bullet holes are 58676779. It has to mean something; Akane never says numbers without meaning something. It hits him again, like one of Ace’s punches and kicks, that he’ll have the whole rest of his lonely, undeserved life to figure it out.

He doesn’t stop it. He has all the opportunities in the world, but he just listens to the horrifying alarm, allows his memories to take him back to the place he wished to never see again. Helpless and alone in the face of the incinerator, no Akane by his side. He looks away for a moment, watches her collapse on the floor of the chapel. The voice speaks again, a time of death for the living.

But he doesn’t stop it, not even as Seven punches Junpei in the gut and wrests him away from the conflict, drags him out of the incinerator at the last moment and the doors shut behind them. When a door opens, it’s supposed to stop. But this isn’t the game anymore, and Aoi no longer has to play by the rules.

It’s satisfying, for a moment, to watch Hongou scream as Akane once screamed, to watch the cones glow orange to red and erupt in a burst of flames. But he hadn’t seen it before, not from this angle, and when the burning starts, there’s no telling one human shape that’s there from another that disappeared long ago.

He’s almost surprised when Junpei finds her on the chapel floor, somehow still there. He has to get him away, that much is clear, but there’s no script, nothing in Akane’s fine writing to provide him with guidance. Money, sure. He’ll be set. But he has no idea what to say, what his sister will hear from the ship’s speakers as his last words to her.

Everything to this point was planned so meticulously that he hadn’t considered he’d be here not knowing what to do. But here he was, and all he could think was one truth more painful than the knife and the axe and the pile of ashes.

“Game over.”

Junpei looks around frantically, as if Zero’d materialize in the room.

(As if she wasn’t there already, dying in his arms instead of Aoi’s.)

“You son of a bitch! Where are you hiding?” Junpei yells, and Aoi recognizes the anger from his own voice. But he can’t allow himself to feel. He is Zero now.

“I am right here. I’ve always been close to you.”

“What the hell are you talking about?” asks Junpei, who is supposed to know all the answers.

“No matter.” It really doesn’t matter anymore. Nothing does. “I will tell you again. Game Over. This game has ended.” Akane could have said it more eloquently in a script, if she’d had the courtesy to write something down for him, but she didn’t. She didn’t, and now she won’t get to talk to him again.

“No! No, it hasn't! I'm not gonna let it end yet! I'm gonna get out of here with Kanny!”

Junpei’s yells sound like the beating of Aoi’s heart. He wishes he could scream into the microphone that if he could, he’d beat Junpei to it.

“You can't. That is impossible,” he says, trying to keep his voice even, hoping it doesn’t catch the strangled sob at the end. He was so close. So damn close.

“Why?” asks the boy who should know everything.

“Because you chose the wrong path.” Akane was right, as she always was. There was no way to go through door 5 and live.

“The wrong path?” asks the boy who was in the incinerator and didn’t bother with the puzzle.

“That is correct. Your path was inevitable, however. Admit defeat.”

He can’t take his own advice. His hands still twitch at his sides, wishing for something to do, whether that means kicking the ashes in the incinerator or using the canister at his feet to make himself forget, even for a moment. But he can’t. He can just talk like Akane, but unlike her, it’s bullshit. “Where there is shadow, there is light. Where there is light, there is shadow. So it goes.”

“What are you talking about?!”

Aoi doesn’t even fucking know.

“It matters not. The loser has been decided.” His hand curls around the canister. He knows what he has to do.

“I told you, I'm not gonna lose!” screams Junpei, and the child inside Aoi who would still beat his hands against the incinerator’s burning walls for his sister.

“No. You misunderstand,” Aoi says, too calmly, as he stands up. “You haven't lost. I... have lost.”

And as he rushes forward with the canister, not bothering to conceal his face or the tears streaming down it, he once again misses the moment she turns to dust.


	2. True

“58676779,” he says casually, as they’re stopped at a gas station in Middle-of-Nowhere, Nevada, and watches her grip tighten on the door handle. Good thing he waited until they stopped. The last thing they needed was to die yet again.

“You remember,” she says, but she doesn't need to apologize. She already has.

“I didn’t know that was an option,” he confesses. Recalls his despair that the pieces could be in the correct place, but the game could still be lost. Remembers the brief moment in this timeline where Akane shoved a familiar paper aside to reach the switch, and he hadn’t given it a second thought.

“I couldn’t bear to tell you,” she says, after several long moments of silence punctuated only by the clunk of the gas pump as it finishes its job, “that there was one timeline where we’d be apart.”

“I thought I’d fucked up, and everything was lost for good.” His voice is accusatory, almost angry. He can still see her turning to nothingness as he lured Junpei away. Watched him scream Kanny’s name over and over, but couldn’t do the same himself. He still had his job to do.

But now that they’ve reached the alpha timeline, his memories are fraying. He can’t remember if he gets a job after, if he ever gets married, has kids. It’s blurry and the harder he tries to remember, the more his head hurts.

“I hope you’ll forget,” she eventually says. And maybe she’s right. He can’t feel the knife as keenly as he did, can’t taste his blood as the axe tears him in two. It feels like he’s waking from a terrible dream, but the sun on his skin is real, and his sister by his side is real.

He tries to smile like he did when they were kids and she’d beaten him in some game or another. “Never do that to me again.”

“I’ll do my best,” she says. But he knows, as she looks to the car door handle instead of his eyes, that this half of Zero will lose again.


End file.
